Problems with Akismet anti-spam
p2pnet news view P2P:- “Automattic Kismet (Akismet for short) is a collaborative effort to make comment and trackback spam a non-issue and restore innocence to blogging, so you never have to worry about spam again,” says the site.
It’s been my principle anti-troll, anti-spam, app ever since p2pnet went over to WordPress, not all that long ago.
Without it, I’d spend hours manually deleting spams (as I used to), and comment posts would be riddled with spurious Reader’s Writes (as they used to be).
However, I’ve just discovered, and cleared, several fairly recent comment posts flagged by Akismet as spam, but which never should have been blocked, and I have absolutely no idea why they were.
Nor, unfortunately, are they the first.
Under moderation, “Hold a comment in the queue if it contains 3 or more links. (A common characteristic of comment spam is a large number of hyperlinks.)”
And, “When a comment contains any of these words [entered into a 'save' box] in its content, name, URL, e-mail, or IP, it will be held in the moderation queue. One word or IP per line. It will match inside words, so ‘press’ will match ‘WordPress’.
There are only five sites/people on my comment blacklist, and they go down the tubes without me ever having seen them.
But I see do see posts from everything in the ‘moderate’ queue, which at the moment has only 14 entries.
Akismet stops scores of spam items every day and I just don’t have time to go through them all.
I’ll try to come up with a better solution, but for now, if your comment post didn’t appear and you believe it should have, please email me here – p2pnet @ shaw dot ca.
I get a lot of emails and I’ll respond as quickly as I can.
Cheers! And thanks — and apologies.
Jon
March, 2009
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March 4th, 2009 at 1:15 pm
When you see a Comment in the spam queue, it can be that the person left a Comment elsewhere that was snarky or bitchy or even spammy and was *manually* marked SPAM at *that* site. From that point on, Akismet will treat that Commenter as spam across all blogs and sites using Akismet.
March 4th, 2009 at 2:26 pm
@ Mike:
Wow! Talk about Draconian!
But what about comments with no obviously disagreeable (in any context) content?
Cheers!
March 4th, 2009 at 3:43 pm
I’ve run into this several times with blocked posts. I very rarely ever use any sort of hyperlink. Nor am I known as one that is a flamer or inciter on other sites, any more than here. I may disagree with you but it will be a worded response, such as this post. I don’t believe I fit any of those patterns outlined.
More than likely, some wording or word usage is the reason for the flag in my case.
Almost always I leave a post about having been hijacked as a spammer with a blocked post, otherwise Jon may never know it happened, nor how many times it might have occurred.
March 4th, 2009 at 4:37 pm
I’d check if Spam Karma 2 works with whatever version of WordPress you’re using. With the Akismet sub-plugin and a little tuning, you can get it so there are no false positives and maybe one or two false negatives per year.
March 4th, 2009 at 6:33 pm
^^ SK2 is no longer developed – http://unknowngenius.com/blog/wordpress/spam-karma/.
I found it after a long search – http://www.ditii.com/2007/06/30/spam-karma-2-plugin/
Plug-in [ http://blog.ftwr.co.uk/wordpress/sk2-simple-digest-plugin/ ] [ http://blog.ftwr.co.uk/archives/tag/spam-karma-2/ ]
I’ve installed it, so stay tuned.
Cheers!